KESÖ

Foto: Robert Jönsson

KESØ is a research project about evacuation safety in the Öresund region. The Department of Fire and Safety Engineering and Systems Safety at Lund University (LU) are cooperating with the Department of Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in the project. The goal of the project is to create a knowledge centre in the area of evacuation safety in the region through cooperation between LU and DTU. The budget for the project is approximately one million euro. The project started in June 2010 and finishes in June 2013.

In the project, LU and DTU will try to determine which evacuation strategies that are most efficient, and therefore should be applied in the Öresundregion. More specifically the project will focus on evacuation strategies from complex constructions, i.e., tunnels and tall buildings.

The Department of Fire Safety Engineering and Systems Safety is involved in research about evacuation from both tunnels and tall buildings. The tunnel part of the project is called METRO and more information can be found here.

The part of the project that researches tall buildings will mainly study the technical systems related to evacuating with elevators, i.e. information systems (alarms) and way-finding systems. The goal is to formulate design recommendations on how the way to the elevators should be marked, how occupants should be informed about the elevators and what type of information/communication that is needed in the elevator lobby. To achieve the goals the project will include the following activities:

Literature survey about evacuation elevators

Cost-benefit analysis of evacuation elevators compared to stairs

Laboratory, or semi field, experiments about information and way-finding systems